Friday, March 18, 2016

Cities to Untangle Traffic Snarls, With Help From Alphabet Unit - The New York Times

Perhaps a future problem domain for AlphaGo...

"“We’re taking everything from anonymized smartphone data from billions of miles of trips, sensor data, and bringing that into a platform that will give both the public and private parties and government the capacity to actually understand the data in ways they haven’t before,” said Daniel L. Doctoroff, Sidewalk’s chief executive, who is a former deputy mayor of New York City and former chief executive of Bloomberg.

Sidewalk was hatched out of Google last June as an independent company that will use technology to solve urban problems — yet another example of how the Internet giant has strayed far and wide from its initial mission in online search. The company is based in New York and was conceived by Mr. Doctoroff, along with a team of Google employees led by Larry Page, one of Google’s founders and now Alphabet’s chief executive."